Maine: 2nd state exchange to report 2026 enrollment data: 9,355 active enrollments in first 15 days

CoverME, Maine's ACA exchange, is the second state after New Mexico to publish official 2026 Open Enrollment data:

The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office of the Health Insurance Marketplace (OHIM) will release biweekly updates on plan selections through CoverME.gov, Maine’s Health Insurance Marketplace.  

Plan selections provide a snapshot of activity by new and returning consumers who have selected a plan for 2026. “Plan selections” become “enrollments” once consumers have paid their first monthly premium to begin coverage. These numbers are subject to change as consumers may modify or cancel plans after their initial selection.   

The deadline to select a plan for coverage beginning January 1, 2026 is December 15, 2025. Consumers who select a plan between December 16, 2025 and January 15, 2026 will have coverage beginning February 1, 2026. 

Officially, they're reporting 58,235 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) enrollments already, which is about 90% of the 64.678 which they ended with during the 2025 Open Enrollment Period (OEP) last January.

HOWEVER...and this is a major caveat...that 58,235 includes all current enrollees being auto-renewed for 2026, which doesn't really count for my purposes. Most state exchanges used to hold off on lumping in the auto-renewals until after the initial December deadline, only reporting current enrollees who actively re-enroll along with new enrollees.

When I look at it that way, I get:

• Active Re-enrollees: 8,248
• New Enrollees: 1,107
• Automatic Re-enrollees: 48,880

The auto-re-enrollee number will shrink over time as more existing enrollees actively choose a new plan (or even the same one) for 2026.

CoverME is running slightly behind last year, when they had 58,600 enrollees as of Nov. 14th (one day less as well), although interestingly they've had over 70% more active re-enrollments so far (8,248 vs. 4,814) for whatever that's worth.

Again, this is still too little data to begin to draw any conclusions about how Open Enrollment is going overall.